The Eastern Slave Trade: Misconceptions and Truths

Long before the first European ship carried an African captive across the Atlantic, caravans of slaves were already crossing the Sahara and dhows laden with slaves were sailing the Indian Ocean. That older trade, often called the Arab or the eastern slave trade, demands honesty in two directions at once, for both the apology and the indictment have distorted the truth.

An Older and a Longer Trade

The trade we deal with in this chapter is not the Atlantic but the eastern one, and it ran along three arteries. The first was the trans-Saharan route, along which people from West and Central Africa had been taken to North Africa since the early Middle Ages. The second was the Red Sea, which connected the Horn of Africa with Arabia. The third was the Indian Ocean, across which the Swahili coast, Zanzibar and the interior of East Africa supplied captives to Arabia, Persia and India.

The first thing that stands out is the duration. Where the Atlantic trade was concentrated in roughly four centuries, the eastern trade stretched across more than thirteen; it began before Islam, continued deep into the twentieth century, and thus touched a far longer span of human history. Estimates of the total number vary widely, and none is precise, but the order of magnitude lies in the millions, possibly of the same order as the Atlantic trade, only spread out over a much longer time. Whoever brandishes an exact figure, whether to accuse or to minimise, is going beyond his sources.

The Misconceptions

Four stubborn misconceptions have grown up around this trade, and all four deserve a direct answer.

The first is that Islam invented slavery, or that Muslims were the only or the worst slave traders. That is false. Slavery is one of humanity’s oldest institutions, known to the Romans, the Byzantines, the Persians, the Chinese and to countless African and European societies long before the seventh century. Islam inherited an existing institution, it did not create it, and the image of the Arab as the primordial slave trader says more about later polemic than about history.

The second misconception is the mirror image of the first: that Islam abolished slavery. That too is false. Islam regulated slavery, bound it to rules, and made the freeing of a slave one of the highest acts of piety, but it did not prohibit the institution. Abolition came only more than a millennium later, and it came slowly, hesitantly and often under external pressure.

The third misconception is that eastern slavery was mild and domestic, and therefore not real slavery. That is a consoling lie, for the trade in eunuchs, of which more below, cost countless lives, and the plantation slavery of the Zanj in southern Iraq was as merciless as any plantation in the New World.

The fourth misconception is that race played no role at all, and here the truth lies in the middle. Islamic law did not base slavery on skin colour, for captives could be Slavs, Turks, Europeans or Africans, but in certain periods and texts anti-Black prejudices do indeed sound through, and in the later centuries sub-Saharan Africans became an ever larger share of the trade.

The Truths that Hurt

An honest treatment must not tuck away the gravest facts, and two of them stand firm.

The first is the trade in eunuchs. At the courts and in the households of the Islamic world there was a demand for castrated men, and that demand was fed by a trade in which boys were emasculated before they reached their destination. Because the mutilation itself was contrary to the law, the castration often took place outside the Muslim cities, and the mortality was horrifyingly high, with estimates that only a minority survived the operation and the journey. Behind every eunuch at a court stood several boys who had not made it.

The second is the Zanj. In the ninth century, great numbers of East African slaves, the Zanj, were put to work reclaiming the salt marshes of southern Iraq around Basra, in conditions that came close to the later plantation slavery of the Caribbean. Their revolt between 869 and 883, one of the greatest slave uprisings in history, held the Abbasid caliphate in a stranglehold for fourteen years and cost an immeasurable number of lives. Whoever calls eastern slavery domestic has never met the Zanj.

The Truths that Give Nuance

But the same honesty that names the cruelty must also name the structural differences, for without them we misread the picture.

Eastern slavery was predominantly domestic, military and sexual in character, and far less than the Atlantic a matter of mass plantation labour. A large group of slaves consisted of concubines, and the law attached consequences to that which were unthinkable in the New World, for a slave woman who bore a child to her master became umm walad, could no longer be sold, and became free at his death, while her child was born free and legitimate. Thus the mechanism that gave Atlantic slavery its dreadful permanence was absent, namely a closed, hereditary caste bound to slavery generation after generation.

A second group of slaves consisted of soldiers and administrators, and their fate could turn out spectacularly differently. The Mamluks, themselves bought and trained as slaves, became the rulers of Egypt and Syria for more than two and a half centuries, and the Janissaries became the core of the Ottoman army. Emancipated slaves and their children could rise to become general, scholar or prince, and they mostly dissolved into free society. The freeing of a slave counted, moreover, as expiation for certain offences and as a pious act in itself, and the right to purchase one’s own freedom was enshrined. The law pushed, however slowly and imperfectly, in the direction of freedom.

Rulers Against the Trade: Attempts, Impotence and Indifference

It is tempting to ask why the rulers of the Islamic world did not end slavery sooner, but the question itself is partly anachronistic. For centuries, virtually no one, east or west, thought of abolition, for slavery was regarded everywhere as a self-evident and lawful institution. Whoever did something in those centuries did it through personal manumission and not through policy, and the freeing of a slave remained an individual act of piety rather than an affair of state.

The real attempts came only in the nineteenth century, and they came unevenly distributed. The Ottoman sultans, partly under British pressure and partly out of their own drive for reform, took a series of measures. The great slave market of Istanbul was closed in 1846, and in 1857 the sultan issued a prohibition on the trade in African slaves throughout the empire. In Zanzibar, Sultan Barghash closed the famous slave market in 1873, under heavy pressure from a British fleet that could blockade his coast.

But the power of a ruler had limits, and those limits are instructive. When Istanbul banned the trade in 1857, resistance broke out in the Hijaz, where local scholars interpreted the ban as an attack on a practice permitted by the sharia, so that the Ottomans were forced to exempt the holy cities from the prohibition. A decree from the capital did not reach the caravan in the desert or the dhow on the Indian Ocean by itself, for the central authorities often ruled only in name over the remote regions where the trade actually took place, while local governors, merchants and tribal chiefs kept it going.

And sometimes it was simply not a priority. A ruler who was waging war, carrying debts or having to put down a revolt had little reason to dismantle a profitable and lawful system on which powerful traders and courtiers depended. Some rulers attempted something, others looked away, and most did something in between, just enough to relieve the foreign pressure without harming domestic interests. And so the trade lived on, in ever smaller form, into the twentieth century, and in a few regions it ended only within the memory of people still living.

Why Honesty Matters Here

The subject of the eastern slave trade is rarely discussed honestly, because it is misused by two parties. One party uses it as a weapon, to shrink or wipe away the European guilt for the Atlantic trade by pointing to Arab or Islamic slavery. The other party denies or excuses it, out of an understandable but untenable wish to keep the history of their own faith community clean. Both distort.

The mature position acknowledges three things at once. Slavery was a nearly universal institution of the premodern world, not the invention of one people or one faith. The Islamic world practised it on a large scale and for a very long time, with real cruelty, above all for the eunuchs and the Zanj. And at the same time it differed structurally from the racialised, hereditary plantation slavery that made the Atlantic trade so uniquely devastating, while the ethical thrust of Islam towards manumission remained in uneasy coexistence with centuries of practice.

With that understanding we return to the Atlantic trade that forms the heart of this part, for it is precisely against the background of this older trade that what made Atlantic slavery so distinctive becomes visible, namely its industrial scale, its unrelenting coupling to skin colour, and its hereditary, lifelong character, running on generation after generation.